February 1st, 2013
by Josephine Falnor
Summary: SPOILERS FOR END OF THE SERIES. One-shot. A last look at the preparations Mello had made for Matt's 21st birthday.


_**Author's Note: So, I haven't posted a story here in forever, but I wanted to do something in honor of Matt's birthday (or what would have been his birthday ;.;). **_

_**Um...be warned? It's going along with the anime timeline, so all you fans should know what that means, what with it being February 1st, 2013. I'm hoping to write something else a little more light-hearted, but this was what my muse wanted to write tonight, so it's what you get.  
**_

_**Also be warned that I'm writing/posting this late, and didn't proofread it. I'll probably reupload it tomorrow, if I find any major problems with it in the morning.  
**_

_**At any rate, happy birthday, Matt! In my head cannon, you're not dead.**_

* * *

I need to write another fic based on my head cannon.

On February 1st, shortly after 9:00 a.m., a delivery man showed up at the door of a small, run-down apartment in a shadier part of Tokyo. He had with him a package to be delivered to the resident of the apartment, a customer whose name on the package was no more than "M." The man rang the doorbell twice, and nobody answered either time. After waiting one last minute, the man tucked the package inside the screen door, and left to make the rest of his deliveries. The package contained a recently released game, but of course, the delivery man didn't know that. He was under oath never to look at the contents of a package he was delivering. He assumed that the resident of the apartment would return soon and would find their package waiting for them.

Three hours later, at noon, the phone inside the vacant apartment begins to ring. Anyone looking at the caller ID on the phone would have recognized that the call was coming from a bakery a few blocks away, one known for their Japanese cakes, as well as their western, "American," cakes. An order had been placed with them a few weeks earlier for a western cake, one layer of vanilla and one layer of chocolate, coated in a thick layer of frosting, and topped off with the words "Happy Birthday, Matt" written in English. The person who had ordered the cake never came to pick it up, and they were now calling to try to find the customer. The cake was paid for, so money wasn't the concern. The woman who owned the bakery simply couldn't understand why someone would order and pay for such an elaborate cake, and then never show up to pick it up. Eventually, she gave up calling, assuming that the customer had gotten tied up, and would be by later to pick up the cake.

Deep inside the apartment, in a closet rarely used by its inhabitants, lay several bags of decorations. Streamers, balloons, poppers, even party hats. All items that one might find at a birthday party for a child, although in this case, they were meant for someone who had had precious few birthday parties as a child. All the items had been lying in the closet for over a week, waiting for today, when they would be put up and used to surprise one of the two men living in the apartment.

The package at the front door was still in the screen a day later. It stayed at the door for several days, until the delivery man returned, having had to return to the complex to deliver another package. He spotted the package still propped in the door, thought that the customer must have been on vacation, or some other excursion, and, not wanting the package to be stolen, took it back to his truck with him, leaving nothing but a note for the residents, saying that they should pick the package up upon their return. The package was taken back to the delivery company, where it would sit indefinitely, waiting to be picked up by a customer who would never show up.

The cake remained at the bakery for two days, at which point the owner tried one last call to the customer before putting it out for her employees to take home. Any longer, and the cake would go to waste. The owner intended to refund the customer, if they came looking for the cake, and so set aside money to do so. A month later, she guessed that the customer was long gone, and so put the money back in the register, letting the memory of the absent customer slip from her mind.

The decorations remained hidden in the closet until the landlord paid a visit to the apartment a week later, its rent overdue. Upon entering, he realized that nobody had been in the apartment in several days. For all intents and purposes, it was abandoned. The landlord made a few half-hearted attempts at contacting the owners before giving up. A week later, the landlord had the apartment cleaned out. The sparse kitchen supplies, the several computers, and the drawers full of blue jeans and leather were sold or thrown out, but the bags of decorations went unnoticed in their secluded spot in the closet. Within two months, new tenants were living in the apartment, completely unaware of the silent departure made by the previous tenants. They would eventually find the decorations, and would throw them out, assuming that they had been leftovers from some event held by the previous owners.

The delivery man and the baker would never be made aware of the fact that their customers were long gone, both killed before the end of January, shortly after one of them had placed his orders for the game and the cake. The landlord would never question the rapid disappearance of his tenants, and the new tenants would never put significant thought into the unopened decorations they found in their closet. Everything about the previous tenants would fade into obscurity.

In the end, nobody would ever know that one of the men who had lived in that apartment had died just six days before his 21st birthday.


End file.
